Crowd-sourcing & sharing ideas to renovate our new house

How to choose colors for your interior

I’ve already written about choosing colors for interior design. Since then, I’ve let my creativity flow, bought several home decoration magazines, and started thinking out of the box. Here is an important tip that I want to share with you today.

If you have a large painting project like ourselves, and don’t know where to start choosing colors, work around some of your favorite furniture or art pieces that can set the scene.

To give an example, we’ve just bought this funky commode:

It was an entirely impulse purchase, but both Sean and I liked it immediately, and thought it would fit into an unused niche in one of the corridors. Since the color of the commode is so particular, it sets the tone to the whole of the surrounding area. Not that I will start painting all my walls pink, but at least I only have a limited range of options now, so my choice is easier.

Another example is these cement tiles in our hallway (this is pretty much the only original item that we left untouched during our renovation project):

I find these tiles very beautiful, and they immediately give a limited, and easier, range of options for choosing color for the area that surrounds them.

Another example is this beautiful chair called MoonLounger by Belgian designer Gerd Couckhuyt. I don’t own one of these, but this kind of chair would be a perfect fit for my office where I definitely want to use orange as the main color, possibly mixed with a tone of aubergine, as illustrated on the photo below.

For me personally, orange is the color of creativity and life energy. It also happens to be the corporate color of my company, so I’ll be happy to integrate it into my home office. The orange I have in mind is a very stylish looking Hermes orange:

If you understand French or Dutch, there are also some great tips on how to choose colors on this site: www.histor.be